The first storage devices were dedicated to a particular computing resource, which may be a server. However, as technology and computing requirements have evolved, servers and the storage that they use are maintained separately and various methods of flexibly assigning storage resources to the servers have been developed. One method of flexibly assigning storage resources employs a pool of storage consisting of logical volumes that may be selected and assigned for a period of time to various servers. A storage administrator configures and maintains the pool of storage resources and a server administrator configures and maintains the servers. The pool of storage resources and the servers shall be referred to herein as “domains.” Both administrators are experts with respect to their own domains and they use a separate set of tools and processes for configuring and maintaining their domains.
In order to preserve security and to adequately use their respective areas of expertise, a storage administrator is typically not allowed to perform server administrator tasks and vice versa. Therefore, the storage and server administrators engage in a multi-phase communication in order to deploy servers and provision storage resources for that server. First the server administrator will communicate to the storage administrator criteria for the storage that will be used to deploy a desired set of servers. The storage criteria shall include, among other things, the number of logical volumes, the size of each of the logical volumes, the RAID level, OS host mode, and so on. The storage administrator will prepare and configure logical volumes for the desired operating systems according to the server administrator's storage criteria, such as the size, RAID level, OS host mode, and so on, so that the desired set of servers can be deployed. The configured logical volumes that are used for booting servers shall be referred to as “boot logical volumes.” The server administrator will configure the desired set of servers and verify that the desired set of servers can be booted using the configured boot logical volumes. Then the server administrator will communicate to the storage administrator storage criteria that will be used for private non-bootable storage that will contain, for example, application data and so on. The storage administrator will configure logical volumes as the server administrator requested to be used as private non-bootable storage. The logical volumes that are used as private non-bootable storage shall be referred to as “private logical volumes.” The server administrator will verify that the servers can access and use the private logical volumes. The server administrator may have to engage in this multi-phase communication with the storage administrator for each server that the server administrator deploys. The multi-phase process of communicating back and forth between the storage and server administrators can take from a few days to several weeks depending on the size of a data center and the data center's protocol for how such communications are to be conducted. This results in a much more frequent interaction between server and storage administrators which in turn reduces the ability of the server administrator to efficiently react to changing business needs within the data center.
The drawings referred to in this Brief Description should not be understood as being drawn to scale unless specifically noted.